Crucial alignment
“We started the migration at the beginning of March, and we went live at the beginning of July”, Verstraate concludes with satisfaction. “Good coordination between all parties is very important. From a technical point of view, the cloud tenant must be delivered at the right time and in the right way. Missing out on the specifications was therefore a no-go. The challenge lay in setting up the platform properly. Thanks to the smoothly running cooperation, we were able to carry out this jointly.”
According to Theunissen, that coordination was at least as important during the weekend of the go-live. “You then have to deal with many different parties. You have to know exactly who does what when. And what to do if something happens. There was not much stretch in the plan.”
There was also an important role for the project manager who was appointed from the business. Theunissen: “Its task was to ensure that resources were available from the business at all times to perform tests. That helps enormously. Then you have to start working with the findings immediately, and not let things take their course.”
Time for embellishment
According to Pots, M&G Group now has a stable foundation on which the company can continue to build, and on which the new factory can 'land'. "We can now start decorating and make optimal use of the power of SAP S/4HANA. We are doing this, among other things, by replacing customization with Fiori apps. For example, we are already there for the 'stream' order-to-cash started with. Further opportunities lie in optimizing processes and implementing SAP best practices as standard as possible. Only in the coming period will we really see the business value of SAP S/4HANA."
